Recent Event

Try to get back up to speed. Yesterday. Another hot one, 102, we worked for a while on the third floor, sorting through things. Found too many old catalogs, several for Carter exhibits, and I need to read them. D goes down and organizes the area around the front desk. I left an hour early, to turn on my AC at home. Got there 4:45 , 90 degrees inside my house. Around 6:00 it suddenly got dark, and the winds went from calm to 85 mph in about 15 seconds. I was sitting at my writing chair, in my boxer shorts, reading the new Elmore Leonard novel, the house down to 86 degrees. The building shuddered. I immediately looked around to see what electrical devices were on, 5 seconds later the lights went out, I picked up the phone and it was dead. One always checks the phone. I put on the LED headlamp that Howard gave me, unplug a few things (I suffer surge, where I am on the grid) get out the oil lamp I've retrofitted with a mirror attached behind, and a couple of candles; open a few windows, in the lee, back my writing chair up against one of the patio doors (to catch whatever ambient light), and continue reading the Leonard novel. It's a good book, with a great character he's used before. What Elmore Leonard learned from George V. Higgins is to let the dialog run the show. Dinner is a wonderful salad of grape tomatoes, with mozzarella and fresh herbs, over which I dumped a can of tuna (in oil), added a dash of balsamic and hot sauce. Managed to eat this while holding the book on my knees held open with a rock, putting down the bowl and eating the occasional dry saltine. A second line of almost dry squalls moves through, maybe an hour later, not quite as severe, and I actually finish the book at a single sitting, which is not unusual for me, but as I get older, it tends to give me a headache. Speaking of headaches, I was at the pub for a pint and Barb mentioned she was hosting a luncheon for a wedding group that was having a reception at the museum next Sunday, and I looked at her as the idiot I often am, and said, honestly, that I didn't know about any reception, went back to the museum and checked the master calendar, checked my calendar, checked Pegi's calendar, and there is not a fucking mention of anything on that date, July 8th, the day in question; who, exactly, runs the museum? I've been confused for some time about this. I have three sleeping stations available, depending on which way the wind blows. Drive in, Mackletree is covered in debris, shattered trees, a maelstrom. The drive in... trying to figure a way that we could work. shattered trees are everywhere, whatever that means. A very strong impulse of very strong power. Five seconds is a very long time. Read more...

Hot Spell

Not too bad, when I got home tonight, I'd stopped at the pub for a pint, to watch the end of a soccer match. Spain beat Portugal and moved on to the finals of the Euro Cup. I like soccer. Spain passed the ball beautifully, and that's cool to watch, and both of those teams played magnificent defense, so it came down to penalty kicks. Tomorrow it's supposed to be 102 degrees, then a 100 degrees for the next four days, with a nighttime low of 75. Too brutal for words. I have the window AC unit, but I don't leave it on when I'm not at home. The house might well be 90 degrees when I get home tomorrow, and Black Dell will not operate until the temp gets down to 80. That could take a couple of hours. Remind me to live in a cave, next time, where I can control the temp with a light bulb. I just get home, haven't gotten a drink or rolled a cigaret, and my sister calls from Florida, wanted to talk about my parents. Not pleasant but necessary, what could be sustained, and what was necessary. Seems my brother was running them into a hole, but he was the primary caregiver, so I can't fault that, and for the last 19 months my sister has had them living in her house. I couldn't do that, my care-giving qualities fall off sharply after a single day. The conversation was long and sad. Then I called my brother, to get an update on his life and that was pretty depressing too. Then the power went out, so I just sat on the sofa in the gathering dark and thought about things for several hours. It was 102 today and the air was too hot to breathe. D and I put away a few things, cleaned some areas, then he was called away by the security people, talking about that aspect of the elevator job and also about installing some security cameras. I puttered around, thinking about my family, like watching a slow motion train wreck. Got through the day, went over to the pub, for a pint, before heading home to what I knew was going to be a furnace, and D joined me, a few minutes later; I hadn't expected him to, but he had a gin and tonic, and John Hogan, himself, joined us for an Irish whiskey. Entertaining, and that broke the spell for me. I went back over to the museum, to kill some time (B makes music with his brother and a few others on Thursday night, they start at 7:00, so if I'm going to be in town late on Thursday, I plan to get home at that hour or later, so that we don't meet on the driveway), and watch a show on the cooking channel; that British woman with the great assets, then stop at Kroger for a few things. It's 90 degrees inside my house when I get home, I turn on the AC but it's still 9:00 before I can write. Fortunately the humidity is very low and as long as you don't move too quickly you don't fall over dead. I can't believe I used to work outdoors, framing houses, in this weather, but I did; now it's all I can do to read, and chew enough to keep from dying. Bound to lose power, I'd better go. Read more...

Usual Start

The usual start to a Tuesday morning is hauling trash, and something has the kitchen smelling like a land-fill. D and I haul a few bags away, then he gets one of his wild hairs, and puts away everything that's been left out (almost everything), in the kitchen, while cursing a beautiful blue-streak about the goddamned sons-of-bitches that never put a fucking thing away. I don't bother with this much anymore, because Trish will get back next week (on vacation with the family in St. Barts), curse a blue streak about people not knowing where anything goes, and spend a day rearranging the kitchen. So Trish is in St Barts, TR is doing a one week music camp at the college, Pegi is doing Cirque camp at their building, and D and I are left holding the fort; but D will be called away constantly, he's working out the logistics for the elevator replacement and the attendant upgrades. A lot of things have to be done during a specific window of time. He's on it, bless his soul, and he's very good at getting the various bids broken down in such a way that he can actually compare oranges to oranges. Everything has to get installed and tested, the elevator itself, the new electrical service for that, the new alarm service, the new phone lines, most of it done in the elevator shaft during a narrow window, and all inspected at the same time, up to code. I've done this a few dozen times, in various fields, and I didn't want to do it again, but it's good to know you can do it, which is why it's such a good idea for D to do it, so he'll know he can. Lunch, tomorrow, is a problem, because everyone else is away, and I told them I'd rather eat late.When I had the bar and the barkeep both within my sight. And there couldn't be anyone looking over my shoulder. They told me they didn't know what I meant, and I congratulated them on their honesty. I went back and took out a comma, altered a tense, in the interest of simplification. Dry and windy, the light is harsh and dappled through the canopy, and the aphid effluent is dark, in sticky pools on the road. My truck tires snicker, going through patches. I've never seen this shit before. It may have been there forever, but I don't think so, I tend to notice things I drive through. I took a sample on a slide, I have a microscope somewhere, and the crystals look like sugar, looks a lot like that classic starch to sugar conversion. If that was true, and we sacrificed a young tree, we could run our lights off aphid shit. Pegi dumped a tour on me, no better way to put it, I'm the docent of choice, but I hate taking kids through the museum because their interest span is so short. I'm not a teacher, just an example of the way things might turn, but they turn to me, when push comes to crunch, because no one does it as well. Which doesn't speak so highly of me as it speaks badly for the rest of the world. Read more...

Good Eats

These might be the best ribs I've ever cooked, The meat is falling off the bone, and the rub is such a perfect balance of salt, pepper and spice, that I have to I eat several without the sauce. And the sauce, actually, is why I'm in this game; though it's reached a level of performance that's beyond my help. I often feel that I'm merely a mechanic, but maybe that's not so bad, the most competent people I know are mechanics. That I should be placed among them would be high praise. Read Jim Harrison essays all day, reread, maybe for the third time, I love his writing, all of it, but I truly love his poetry and the personal essays. Decided to treat myself to lunch at the pub, with a pint, and I wanted to take Barb a few ribs, so I drove into town the long way around, down the creek, then along the river road. Not a lot of traffic, and I pulled over at every opportunity (and I know all the opportunities) to let people around. I make no bones about the fact that I drive slowly and look around. This whole aphid crisis, remember it came from me. They could bring us down, in a stalemate situation we'd be encased in aphid effluent, silent and fixed, like a bug in amber. They're producing huge quantities of whatever it is. The back roads, where the trees canopy, you can hear the stickiness when your tires roll over it. We all have our boundaries. A cantilever too far. Read more...

Curious Incident

I had noticed a hickory tree, on the way back in yesterday, near the base of the driveway, that was leaning in a different position than it had previously. After dinner, I was sitting out on the back steps, enjoying a smoke, having the last of the Single-Barrel whiskey Kim had brought. Late setting sun in glorious color, outrageous oranges and reds. Not really thinking about anything, poking between my teeth with my tongue, amazed that little flecks of meat could still be so flavorful, when a mournful rending sound echoed through the hollow. I knew it was a tree shattering and I knew specifically which tree. I'm pretty sure it was that hickory. It was leaning at a unsustainable angle, I had registered that. Ordinarily wouldn't find out for sure until I go out on Tuesday morning, but I might walk down tomorrow, just to see if I'm correct. It could be a different tree, fallen on the driveway, that B and I would need to address. These things happen. What was curious was that this specific time I was in position to hear it. A slow twisted rending. On a close night, when the fog was climbing up the ridge, it would be great to hear Stephen playing Cello Suite #6 about half-way up the driveway: it would sound so good. Like those natural amphitheaters along the Colorado. A ridge is always the product of two hollows, sound carries. I was hiking a slot canyon in southern Utah once, 100 degrees and zero humidity, and I heard water coming; I clambered up to a ledge that was maybe eight feet above the bottom of the slot. A sluice of water roared through, four feet deep, forty miles an hour, gone in a heartbeat, but if I hadn't heard it I would be dead, another victim of unexpected circumstance. As it happened, I was rolling a smoke, four feet above the torrent, not a care in the world. Just lucky to be there. Beautiful day on the ridge. Walking out to the truck for drinking water, though, netted three ticks. Plain yogurt with sun-warmed blackberries for breakfast, during the rest of the day, every couple of hours, I'd have a rib and a few bites of macaroni salad. Read through a pile of London Reviews, finished a Lee Child novel (how is Tom Cruise going to play a character who is 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighs 240 lbs ?), then some Carter material I'd brought home, along with a book on Grant Wood. A well-rounded day of reading. Did a word search through my archives, 'Janitor College', a raft of stuff, and if it were ever to be a book, the opening would be a wonderful page I wrote a few years ago, about Janus being the patron saint of janitors. I like it still. Read more...

Good Eats

Four in the morning and I awoke, needing to pee, I had gotten the little shop-vac out, last night, to remind myself that I needed to address the various dust-bunnies and especially the fallen tobacco around the chair where I write. So I vacuumed for a while. Nothing like the present. Rolled a smoke and got just a smidgen of Irish whiskey, mostly to displace the taste of sleep. I'd been assembling the ingredients for a rub I'd use on various meats during the summer, and decided to go ahead and mix that up, stash it in a canning jar in the fridge. Assorted dried chilies, kosher salt, black and white pepper, cumin, garlic powder, onion flakes, granulated cane sugar, dried ginger, and a few leaves of a plant a friend sent me from Central America that promise to get me in touch with my ancestors. A little bit can't hurt. I'm mixing this all together, at the island, listening to The Grateful Dead, "Ripple", and I'm grinding up the leaves in my stone mortar with my stone pestle. Maybe, because of my history, I'm susceptible, or maybe just suggestible, but when I was grinding up those last leaves, and I was breathing the dust, I never wear a mask when I'm cooking, something happened. I'm pretty sure it's a strain of Datura. I'm humming along, occasionally actually singing a lyric, and I remember, vividly, the smell of my grandfather's hat. It's not a fabrication, it's the actual smell. And I see him, the most successful mule trader in western Tennessee, in something like a Grant Wood pose, with grandma scowling in the background. This could be a good rub. I don't mind being reminded of my failures. How else are you going to learn? A quick run to town with the revised shopping list. I spent so much time looking at the ribs that a butcher came out and chatted with me about what I wanted. I explained that I wanted baby-backs, but that I wanted some meat on them. He took me back to the cooler and I was able to select a slab from a stack of about fifty. A perfect rack. Back home, I work on the sauce for a while. I'd picked up a pretty good Ravenwood Old Vines Zin, and I added some of that, part of a dark beer (an oatmeal stout), some cranberry juice (in which I cooked some onion and garlic, then strained), some tamarind syrup, brought all that to a boil, then let it simmer, with no lid, to let it reduce a bit. Started a mesquite fire, cut the rack in half, rubbed it down, let it come to room temp; the fire was all up against one side of my Weber grill, and I seared the half-slabs on both sides, then wrapped in several layers of heavy duty foil, in a kind of boat shape that I have learned allows me the best chance of saving all the liquid without burning myself. The liquid goes into the sauce, which adds great flavor and the layer of fat that will protect the product until the next use. Cool system. So, the seared ribs are in their boat, and I spin them 180 degrees, off the fire but with the draft on their side of the lid (opened about half way) every 15 minutes for the next two hours. I serve the sauce on the side. I used to have a timer, but the magnet wasn't strong enough and it self-destructed. Now I just sit at my desk, where the one clock in the house sits behind a pile of manuscript pages that is almost six inches high, and try to write a sentence every fifteen minutes. The ribs are prefect, I mean, they're extremely good. There is a fair amount of meat, though not Country Ribs by any measure, and it is falling off the bone. The sauce is fantastic. We've been through eight years of severely restricted funding, and it feels good to be able to buy her some nice things. I'm just grazing right now, the first and smallest rib, but I'm just about ready to go away for a while and get terribly messy. Instead of slaw I made a wonderful cold macaroni salad, with lots of finely minced shallots and celery, a great dressing I don't remember making. The Texas Toast serves its function, soaking up the juices. Wish you were here, I feel almost guilty, eating this alone. Read more...

Then Another

Nothing if not still active. There is no guaranteed thread of connection. This aphid effluvium is become a problem. I parked under a tree yesterday and coming home I couldn't see out of the windshield. I can't not think about it. It's sticky and clear and refracts light, and requires that I stop at the lake and clean at least a portal, through which to see where the edge of the road actually is. I hate driving into the sun. Increasingly, there are blind spots, and outside curves where I have to slow to a crawl. I may be involved in an accident, but I never cause them. I'm so protective of my solitude, that I'm actually over-attentive, if that's possible, and end up watching myself too closely. An easy day at the museum, the end of Art Camp and the kids were all over the place, then a performance of a little play they had worked on during the week, so I pretty much holed up all day. Read all the catalogs Sara had compiled of Carter one-man shows. D and I went over the schedule for the next year in great detail, because the elevator work starts in a couple of months, and that's going to cramp operations. I stayed for a while, after we closed, reading, waiting for the Friday mob to clear out of Kroger, but it never did, and I didn't have a decent list anyway, so I'll make a run to town tomorrow, for the library and groceries. I want to cook a slab of ribs, slaw, some kind of potato log, and then just eat that all weekend. Some Texas Toast and a jar of pickled peppers. And I need to boil the sauce, with some drippings, so that a layer of fat (which I throw away the next time I use it) protects the actual sauce from any possible contamination, though I don't think it could actually be contaminated, because it lives in an alternate universe where spice and heat precludes any possible infection. And I need to clean out the fridge, there's crap in there I can't identify. I like the way this is shaping up. Maybe I should do two slabs of ribs, as a hedge against inflation. It's just as easy to do two slabs, and that way, I could give a few away, Barb and Justin would both like them; they are, maybe, the best ribs in the known universe. Three or four, maybe more, things I do very well, I'm not modest about my capacity, I do what I do. But I can cook baby-back ribs. Read more...

Mare Turba

I couldn't decide what I meant, you could translate what was said one way or another. I have to go to bed, but I wanted to leave a marker for myself. Memory tabs. Mostly my notes don't make any sense to me. A Latin word or phrase, 'Mare est in turba', which means, literally, 'the sea is in turmoil', but my high school Latin teacher, Miss Craig, used in a colloquial sense to mean that she was displeased with a translation. Colloquialisms are a problem, a difficult aspect of language. What is said doesn't mean what is said, there's no indicator; and they're specifically regional, so if you move around a lot, as I've done, there's a confusion about what's meant. TR, a local, used the phrase 'I don't care to' today in a way that meant he'd gladly help with whatever it was. Almost anyplace else in the country, if you used that phrase, it would mean you didn't want anything to do with whatever it was, but he meant the exact opposite. A good example of this, in the modern media, you can find in that female character on NCIS, she misuses words and phrases in a charming way, but speaks impeccable English otherwise. My control on this is a consortium of waitresses and bar-keeps, dudes that make their living trapping animals, and the occasional good old boy I meet clearing a fallen tree off Mackletree. Language, meaning, is a slippery slope. Context is everything. Hard off an early morning I spent deep into consideration of certain teleological issues, why I was here, stuff like that, and I'm driving out, glad to have the early morning cool blowing away the cobwebs, and there's a dead tree fallen on the road. I could drive around the other way, there are options, go back home and take the day off, but the point is, I don't have a chainsaw with me and I can't deal with the situation. Just then a good old boy in a beat to shit pick-up truck stops from the other direction, and he does have a chainsaw, in the back of his truck, and we clear the road in just a very few moments. We communicate mostly by grunts and nods. What needs to be done. This is the way language evolved, I think: first nouns, then verbs. First you name something, then you do something with it. D and I hang the two new Carters. There's an Art Camp going on, and a concert for kids in the theater, so I holed up in my office and read about Carter all afternoon. Delightful. William Robinson wrote the excellent text of the big "Snapshot Show" that Sara put together. He's one of the curators for American painters at the Cleveland Museum. At one point there were 51 curators there. They have their own shop for building shipping crates, full-time carpenters; I imagine their janitorial staff is huge. So the show went there, of course. D and I had built all the shipping crates (on the floor of the shop in the theater building at the college) and after it arrived and they had installed it, Bill called Sara and said that the preparators had told him that it was the best packed show they'd ever uncrated. High praise in small circles. We knew we had done a good job, because most of the paintings were ours and our priority was protecting them. After work D wanted to go for a beer, it being way too hot to even consider yard work, and after a quick check of the weather channel on his IPhone, and there being no squall lines in sight, I agreed to a cold pint before going back to my house, which I knew would be sweltering. Black Dell is a demanding bitch. I can turn her on at the lower end of 82 degrees. Took two hours to get the house from 90 degrees down to the lower part of 82. Probably, this time of year, I should write in the early morning hours. The waiting is too painful. I read the text on a tube of yellow rice, I read several essays in the London Review: I read an entire issue of the New Yorker, ads and all, killing time. All I want to do is write, this intervening shit is a pain in the ass. I made a great pork fried-rice, I have friends that would kill for this recipe, but there isn't a recipe, exactly, just some things I throw together. Read more...

Intarsia

Looking at some images of classic in-lay, and they blow me away. It is, actually, like brain surgery, a simple chess board of ebony and holly (the perfect black and white field) is an array of absolutely straight lines. Not an easy thing to achieve with organic components. Things rarely stay straight in nature. Stratified clay, at sea level, pressured into sandstone or limestone, might form a fairly straight line, the grain of a red oak, grown in a hollow, out of the wind, but even a line drawn between two objects in space, over time, becomes a curve. Fractured obsidian holds its form for a very long time, but eventually becomes dust, even diamonds fade away, whatever brilliance they might have had dulled by cosmic radiation. Just berries and cream for breakfast and I did two big tours today, an hour and twenty minutes each. A bright young woman in the first group, very interactive. I liked her, from the docent point-of-view, she asked good questions. I was in decent form. When I'm in good form I make them laugh and jab them with little facts. Because there's such a variety of work, in so many different mediums, there are a great many things that can be said. It's a fun tour. I got both groups into the Carter Gallery, where I'm honing my skills to better docent the docents next month. I have to read back over some things. I get the dates confused. Very hot and I have to run the AC for two hours to get the temp down to Black Dell's maximum operating temp. She is become fickle and slower than Methuselah. I didn't send last night because I fell asleep while writing, but woke up curiously refreshed, like I'd purged myself of something in the night. Probably a false positive, but I take solace where I can. Several of the young folk from yesterday came back today, wanting another hit of whatever it was. I told them it's just a matter of looking. That's all I do, when I'm not doing the other things that constitute 'being in the world'; maybe a third of my time, slightly less, is spent in that world, where I inter-face with people and talk about things that I seem to understand. The rest of the time I'm looking at aphid droppings through a magnifying glass. Wondering at the sound my tires make, driving through that sticky shit. It's not a manifesto, just some notes I jotted on a napkin. It is my tendency to remain demure, probably, that saves me from answering any serious questions. Read more...

Fireflies

There's a great essay by Rumford, #10 (I have no idea who numbered these) titled "On the Construction of Kitchen Fireplaces and Kitchen Utensils, Together with Remarks and Observations Relating to the Various Processes of Cooking and Proposals for Improving That Most Useful Art" in which he asserts that the flame need not be visible, and should be contained in the narrowest possible confinement. A fire-box, in other words, rather than an open flame, he'd designed some cooking stations for the Austrian Army at this point, that were remarkable, jacketed pots that fit down inside rings. My wood cook-stove is an incredibly sophisticated piece of work, hot combusted gases circle an oven where I can stabilize the temperature with various dampers and the specific wood I'm burning at a given time. As with any boat, you learn the ropes. It's not brain surgery but it does require attention, the down-haul on the main is a very specific line. It's usually coiled at the base of the main mast in a particular way. A right-hand coil. Even if you're left-handed, the coil is going to be certain way. I had a large bowl of cornmeal mush (Yodders, next to the polenta, less than half the price) with black raspberries and cream, excellent. My fingers are purple, but I never had to go more than fifteen feet from the back door. I only pick the outside edge because rattlesnakes love a berry patch. I only pick what I need, and right now the picking is good. B likes to pick enough to make and can some juice so he can marinate a leg of lamb in it, then rub and grill. A very good dish. He was just over, asking me if that was a tick in the small of his back, nope, I said, just where one was; and he was curious if I was still alive because he came over Saturday night and the lights were off. Explained how wasted I had been, but that I had gotten up in the middle of the night and written for a couple of hours, before I once again sank into a profound sleep, that time on the sofa. I woke up with two thoughts running around in my head, one was that before Chicago, Cincy was the slaughter capitol of the world, and that the mechanization adumbrated Henry Ford, and two, I don't know enough about chairs. They're missing completely from the Gothic, everyone just sits on three-legged barn stools and over-turned baskets, look at the naturalistic work of the time, no chairs. Tables were just trestles and planks that were set up in front of you, your plate was just a crust of bread, which you ate, and the plank was probably put on the floor so the dog could lick it. Read more...

Aftermath

I was early, so I could clean up, then TR showed up a little early too, and we put away the rest of the tables. I broke him in on the big four-foot dust-mop and I mopped. We agreed, he and I, that we couldn't stand to open the museum with dirty floors. I might teach him to mop, he might need a smaller mop-head, it's a body mass issue; I use a 28 ounce mop head and it might pull him off his feet. They make a 24, and I've got an extra mop pole, I could make him his very own mop. A pretty special moment, your first mop. At any rate, the museum is presentable. Which is all I really cared about. You don't want to hear shoes squeaking on the floor, to know that a note might have been passed. I guarantee perfect service. My company can actually do anything. We've already created life in different universes, we hold the patent on the magic carpet ride. Just saying. I'm surprised that what I found there was, more or less, what I was expecting. Just an observation. Atypical Affective Disorder. Nothing you would ordinarily think about. Yesterday, mopping, I was looking at the wet lines I was creating with my modified chevron, thinking they were a very ephemeral depiction of movement. A line of thought that quickly frays into hundreds of sub-thoughts. I kept putting down my mop (I was on my own time here) and wandering off to the library to reference something. "Nude Descending A Staircase", for instance, records time. Muybridge, of course. And this incredible bronze piece, not done so much as a work of art, but as a solid depiction of movement, a teaching aid, by E. J. Marey. He was one of those brilliant Frenchmen of the last half of the 19th century who were intent on figuring things out. He was a physiologist, by profession, who had developed and built the Spygmograph, a device that inscribed the human pulse on a smoke-blackened cylinder. A very interesting person. He invented all kinds of things to allow him to examine movement. One of his, I don't know what to call them, experiments doesn't seem like exactly the correct word, but whatever, was called "Recording A Gull's Flight In Three Projections", recording a flying gull from three different angles photographically, and the "Bronze Model Of The Flying Seagull" was a result of that. It's a magical piece. One reference led to another and I found myself reading a long essay on the development of the modern kitchen. Not as farfetched as you might think. It's all about movement. Count Rumford, one of my favorite people in all of history, and redesigning the kitchen was a fetish of his, enters stage left. In a servant-free house, he reasoned, being a democratic and proto-feminist guy, food prep and serving should be simplified. Single-handedly configured the modern kitchen, I, for instance, being only two or three technologies behind, use a stove of his design, where a small, isolated fire, does a great deal of work. I'm not one to waste BTUs. An advantage to being brought up poor, don't waste anything. I save those sheets of paper butter comes wrapped in, to start fires mid-winter, a stack of them, in the freezer. Despite having habits that would indicate otherwise, I'm not that strange. How well do you know anyone? Read more...

Explaining Yourself

Jogging memory is a dubious course, so many things you don't want to remember, personal failures and social mistakes. You recall an event and cringe at your clumsy attempt to impress some other person. I noticed, toward the end of this installation, when D, Sara, and I would go out for a smoke, slumped on the loading dock, weary, foot-sore, and mentally depleted, we'd just talk about something else, modern art is a large field; but what you see here, this show, is a product of our labor. I can't believe we did it, the hurdles were impossibly high. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself if you want to keep doing whatever it is, watching tadpoles, flirting with a fox, trying to find a place where you fit in. This introduction prescribed by those fucking birds. I wish I lived in a missile silo. Where I could keep sound at a bearable level. But you get one of those goat-suckers close to the window where you sleep, and the game is called. I advise retreat, I usually do. Better you should collect a ring of rocks and start a camp-fire, than that we should ever conspire. It's often just language that separates us. I only talk the way I do because of the voices in my head. Period, space, pillow, sleep, well and truly wasted. Got to work early because the punch-list was still fairly long. Finished everything: setting up tables and chairs, the signage, bonnets on the pedestals, the galleries emptied of detritus. The food and booze crew arrived, board members and spouses with a couple of hired hands, and I was the designated taster. The food was very good, the chicken salad in half of a little puff pastry was fantastic, many people liked the pate especially. It was a great party, I drank sparingly and socialized more than in forever. I knew so many of the people. Great conversations. Some excellent ankles on view. Marsea was there, with our patron Alma, who is 100 years old and still gets around, and we managed to steal a few moments to hold each other around the waist and transmit finger talk through the fabric. I couldn't move to San Francisco, but I could afford to fly her here once a month. Fuck, I'm a loner, I'm not sure I could be with another person even one day a month. Read more...

Final Push

Another long and exhausting day but we are 99% done and still have until six o'clock tomorrow evening to do any final tweaking. TR finished the labels, we moved pedestals and set the 3-D pieces, Sara and D started the lighting, and I went into full-bore janitor mode. I looked exactly like a janitor, jeans with a few holes, gray tee-shirt with a few holes, Eyrie Vineyards cap; had my dust broom, regular broom, dust pan, and my mop bucket. First I swept twice, then I went around the entire gallery, kneeling, like I was at a sacral event, scraping frosting from last week's wedding and reception out of the grout joints, then I swept those up (you have to let frosting dry until it can be swept), then I mopped until my arms were falling off. A dozen or so places required four passes with the mop, and I had to change my water and Damp Mop mixture twice. The lighting, as always, explodes the show. I tasked TR to assist D, which I usually do, because I was busy, mopping behind them. Three ladies came in, mid-afternoon, and Sara called me over, introduced me, one of them, Wendy, was the chief docent at the Columbus Museum, and there was a Carter painting in their current exhibit. She wanted to bring the Columbus docents down here, to go through the Carters and wondered who could docent the docents, and Sara told her I was the guy. That guy over there with the mop bucket. Some time in July. I'll unload a bunch of data on them, along with some personal opinion, see how they respond.. It might be cool if we could film it. Docenting is everything, the way we learn what is what. I just try to be historically accurate, whether or not we're playing in the same decade. I need Glenn's input here because he sees things and I merely hear. Read more...

Judgement

A long day, but it's done, and the main gallery is empty of art work for the wedding and reception. Started the day laying out the works that were composed of several pieces (some ceramic wall hangings, groups of prints) and all the rest of the 3-D pieces. Spread everything out (300 works) covering every inch of wall space in every gallery. The judge arrived from Columbus, and we started right to work. Every judge is different, works differently, has different criteria. Sometimes it's a reductive process, taking rejected works away or turning them to face the wall; sometimes it's the opposite, affixing post-it tags on pieces that are to be in the show. It this case we affixed the post-its and left everything else facing out. It took three passes for him pick the 90 to 100 pieces we needed for the show (there are 93) and less than three hours. Pretty good clip. On our feet all day. Sara and Tim went to a very late lunch;TR, D and I tag-teamed our lunch during the selection process, thereby being able to start separating the accepted from the rejected, noting all the accepted pieces on the entry cards, everything else, perforce, rejected. Then physically moving everything out of the main gallery (just one of the extra steps imposed by the wedding), putting the accepted work in the Library and Board rooms and the rejected work in the theater. Then upstairs, where we repeated the process of separation. D entered everything into the new data bank, which should notify everyone, and then print our label copy (which still has to be mounted on matt board and trimmed). Excited about some of the things the judge picked, but because he runs a successful gallery in Columbus, and, admittedly knows little about the plastic arts, he was what I would call conservative. Knows his art history. It was great, following him around, listening to him talk, why this, not that. He picked someone Best In Show that will truly be shocked, but is, in fact. I was dumb-founded when that particular work came in, it's stunning. Actually, for the first time, I was three for three on the three cash prizes. Cream floats, and I've been looking at artwork for a very long time, what passes, and what passes isn't near the bar. I don't accept anything that's not nearly perfect. There's a watercolor I want to buy, if my vehicle would run another month, it's haunting, and a trompe l'oeil autumn berry that makes me want to weep, a life-size cartoon cowboy that's wonderful. It's going to be a great show. Went to send last night and the phone was dead again, and that's like four days out of the last six. Tested my phone in their test jack and no dial-tone, so the problem is definitely on their end. So I'll just go on. Went to town, stopped at the museum, and it was a zoo, ten people setting up and decorating for a wedding, but I wanted to get the new Carter paintings off the wall. Trish had moved some artwork, which always pisses me off, no one but D and I handle the art. It's a rule. Did my laundry (as I won't have another chance for a while) then stopped back by the museum, had a smoke with Sara and talked about the installation. I love this part of things, when I install shows. Stopped at Kroger and picked up what I needed to make a monster batch of pate: 20 ounces of chicken livers, a total of 20 ounces of assorted mushrooms (four different kinds), 20 ounces of ground veal, and scallions. I have everything else on hand. Tomorrow is pate day, and cleaning up from making pate day. I don't have an actual recipe for this, I just use certain proportions. A mystery in the forest. Where the trees canopy the road, if there is a light rain, there are often dry spots, but something was going on now that was completely the opposite, those very areas that would be dry in a light rain were wet and sticky. B had just started down the driveway, barely, and I was almost all the way to the top, and the rule is that the person going up has to back down, but B was able to reverse in 4-wheel drive and honked me by. We stopped and chatted. He had a rattlesnake in a five gallon bucket that he was going to relocate, in the back of his truck. What the wet spots are is aphid droppings. No kidding, that's what the substance is. A lack of winter, this is what you get, too many bugs. They're eating the leaves of trees and excreting a substance that both refracts light and sounds like gummy bears when you drive over it. What Falstaff says. The comedy of the natural. 2:34 the next morning, still no phone, and the goddamned goat-suckers (spell check likes a hyphen in that) awaken me from a blissful sleep. Sara said, yesterday, that after "Cream..." is installed, I should take some time off, go see my girls, and the idea appeals to me. A road trip, the girls, their friends in Denver, some bookstores. I have to stay the week after the opening, because both Pegi and TR will be out, working the Cirque summer program, but after that I might take a work week off, which would give me nine days, three days out, three days in Denver, three days back. If I bought an old lap-top that did nothing but word processing I could post from the road. D, I think, said they had one I could have. Every motel has an inter-net connection, and I could have nine shower/baths in succession, wash off several layers of skin. If you drive Least-Heat Moon's blue highways, and stop at the diners where the cop cars are parked, you can eat pretty well. The pie in Kansas is outstanding. In Denver, I'd do the cooking, because it would be expected, but I'd have three days to think about the three meals I'd prepare. I could enlist Kaylee's aid roasting vegetables, and Samara could be in charge of salads. We'd need coleslaw, for the night I do ribs, and Texas Toast. Probably need to do some variation on the pounded tenderloin medallions, and chicken thighs in an orange juice reduction. Don't get ahead of myself, first I have to leave. Leaving is extremely difficult for me, once I'm on the road, it's cool, I'm, like, on the road, and the future is held in abeyance, where I stop or what I see. But leaving, itself, is an obstacle. Frankly I'd rather just hole up, not move, secure my position on the ridge and prepare my potato cannon to protect my stand. But it's good to get out, see the lay of the land. I started this page Thursday and it's now Saturday and I still don't have a phone. The company (Frontier) evidently sent someone out, but they couldn't find my place or couldn't get up the driveway or something. I heard about this from a operator in Cincy, who didn't have a clue about what was going on, out here in the field. Monday I'll talk with one of their repair guys, they regularly gather in the back corner of the parking lot behind the museum. B came over for coffee and a couple of hours of conversation. We touched all the bases. I had missed these rambling talks. He had written an essay on solitude, I think I mentioned, and there was a sub-text that concerned our relationship, and we talked about that. I tried to explain the jumble of tenses that happened when my phone was out and I just kept writing, and he knew exactly what I was talking about. Even dumb errors might make a point. Reading B's essay, or Skip's new book, or Steven in manuscript, requires complete attention; my part of the interaction, as reader, mandates that I kill the breaker on the refrigerator because I don't want to be disturbed. This thing, whatever I'm doing, reading or writing or examining tadpoles, requires my full attention. I took out a comma there, it took over an hour of consideration. But I can do that, spend an hour on a comma. When I was picking up the things I needed for the pate, I ran into Ally, photographic guru responsible for a resurgence of interest in that department at the college, and we pulled our carts out of the desire paths so we could talk. You can't help but notice, at moments like this, what's in the other person's cart. I'm not judgmental, I steer well clear of all that shit, what you do is your own business, but she asked me about the eclectic accumulation of things in my cart, and I explained I was making pate for the opening; aged, for a few days, under a layer of pork fat, it should marry beautifully. I've gone on too long, what I meant could be condensed into a very short paragraph. B said, and I agree, if you took Steven's work, and compressed it into paragraphs, we might sound similar. Bastard actually writes better than me. If there was a competition, he'd win, but I'm proud to be second or third. Fuck a bunch of special interest. To be in the same ballpark is not a flattery I even enjoy. I'm best left alone. If not this then that, best left alone. No matter what you think. Sunday, still no phone. D, TR and I meet at the museum and start shuffling art around. TR works most of the afternoon getting the rejected work into the theater, alphabetically arranged. Sara comes in, we get the entire show set. Tomorrow we start hanging. Show needs to be finished end of the day Thursday, because the purchase patrons will be milling about Friday morning. The museum was trashed when we got there, tables and chairs everywhere, and the floor was in terrible shape. We ignored it all. I did mop an area where someone had spilled something. Got the pate made. It's very good, though I was on cruise-control, and I don't actually remember cleaning up. I was groggy all day today, Sara missed my humor, but I just didn't feel good, rare, for me. Tomorrow I can roll around on a board room chair while I do the math, an easy physical day for me, but my brain will be fried for the next two days. Generally, every bay has a large piece, centered, flanked by smaller pieces that reflect color or form. You could install this show a hundred different ways, but this is a good way, and it's going to be lovely thing. I'd like to hang 40 pieces tomorrow, I'd feel comfortable with that. We have to put up one panel, at the signage wall, so we can hang the three-part, white, ceramic piece. 40 pieces is ambitious, if we get 31 done, we're cool, can't set pedestals for the 3-D work until after the tables and chairs disappear. The labels I can do in half-a-day, on Thursday, while Sara and D adjust the lighting. We can do this. Only slightly impossible. If nothing goes wrong. But of course, something will. Don't remember what I said in the short post from the museum last night, but we did get the forty pieces hung yesterday, after a very scary beginning to the day. It had rained overnight Sunday and into Monday morning, but I had to get to work. The top of the driveway was a clay quagmire, so I went over the edge in first gear, 4-wheel low, barely moving, gained control of the truck after about twenty feet. We put a lot of camber in the top part of the driveway, so any out-of-control slide pushes you over so that the left tires are in the grader ditch. This allows you to regain control. It can be harrowing. But got to work, cleaned up, Sara came in and we tweaked a few things, then D and I started hanging. We were very fast. Sara pointed out today that we were so fast yesterday, because the museum was closed, no interruptions. Today we hung the upstairs galleries and D was getting called away every few minutes, I finally enlisted TR to run the numbers so I could hang the pictures. Dealt with the egos of artists all day, as they returned for rejected work. It's the hardest part of this show, but it is a good show, one of many possible shows that could have been assembled from the submitted work. Finished hanging, except for a few things that go on signage walls, and we don't have the signage yet (we never hang those two walls until after we have the signage, too easy to make a mistake), and we have to set the 3-D pieces, sixteen of them, which might take an hour. Should be able to start the labels tomorrow, which, I think, gets me slightly ahead. Pegi made it abundantly clear that cleaning the floor was my responsibility, and I think I can do that between the purchase patrons and the opening on Friday; at least get up the sticky stuff, there'll be a 160 people at that event, with finger-food, no one will even see the floor, as long as it's not sticky. It'll need cleaning again after: pate in the grout joints, and everything else, flaky pastry, ground bits of fruit, and the spillage of various liquids. Post napoleons. Read more...

Punch List

Right there at the end, and the list is doable. An intense final push tomorrow. My truck was missing badly on the way to work this morning and I thought I'd better stay in town. Also I had gotten in touch with the phone company and they said that a repairman would call me at work and he never did, so I assumed another night with no phone and that page I'm working on there is becoming unwieldy. Long day on our feet and D and I were both wasted. We tracked down a missing painting (there is art work everywhere) and got it hung in the back hallway. Did the labels. I can't believe they're done, but they're all on the floor beneath the corresponding work. Actually got a third of them up last thing today. Sara and D do the lighting tomorrow, and I'll finish the labels and start cleaning up. The place is always a wreak after an installation. The floor is a multi-layered disaster. We started a final list, but it got so long as to be boring, we know what needs to be done. I have a lot of touch-up painting to do, in four different colors. Move the humidifiers to the basement, hang one last piece, do the signage, haul garbage, mop the floor. Doable. After work I drove over the Scioto bridge and back, the truck is seriously sick, but maybe I can take it somewhere tomorrow. Which I want to do so I can get home. I'd been over to the pub and had a few, came back to the museum and watched an episode of Modern Marvels about moving heavy things, and the phone rang. It was the Frontier repairman and he was just coming off my ridge having fixed the phone. It was their problem. He actually drove up the fucking driveway. Unbelievable. I was shocked. He said it was a cool place but it could use some yard work. He had to go through about eight feet of blackberry canes to get to the box, in which he simply replaced the modules, just as I suspected, and had told everyone that I could do, if they'd just would give me the goddamned things. But that would have been too simple. Nonetheless: I had a conversation with a woman in NYC and tried to explain how awkward the situation was, and I felt like I was talking to someone on another planet, and that she couldn't possibly understand what I was saying, but she took notes and asked good questions, and the job order filtered down to the cowboy that actually drove a 4-wheel van and serviced their 'difficult' locations. He did admit that mine was at the top of his list. I don't know whether to be proud or not. Now I just have to get home, to send that unwieldy paragraph, and my fucking truck is sick, this is like the luck of the Irish. Not that I think that particular piece is anything special, but it does, because of the timing, become a set-piece, and therefore curious in what it recounts. I think, I'm not sure, I don't have a blueprint, that it might cover setting a show. It got too large for me to read the whole thing, I'd only read the last ten or twelve lines to figure out what I was saying. I read the whole thing last night, before I signed off, and it's an accurate picture from a highly personal viewpoint. When there's a lot going on, everyone's point of view is different; even when there's not a lot going on, things are not the same. Everyone sees everything differently.. Hard to remember. The nature of reality. One of the few breaks today, Sara, D and I, out on the loading dock having a smoke, and we were talking about Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Where else could you be having this conversation? Read more...

Something Simple

Brain dead. Tired feet. Much art work all day. Some good stuff, some great stuff, and some fairly shitty stuff. The usual gamut for this show, which is an unusual installation because it isn't thematic and every other show we do is. Tomorrow is the last day for submissions and it will be a circus, then the judging on Thursday. Kim was here, yesterday afternoon until this morning. Went to the pub, he sang a few songs, met John Hogan, himself. He'd brought a very good Single-Barrel whiskey, and we had a couple after we got home. I fixed us a decent supper of pork tenderloin medallions with a marinara of caramelized sweet onions and fire-roasted tomatoes, the sauce, and mashed potatoes. Talked into the night about our years together in theater, the designers we worked for, Herbert and Helen, and how that had affected our entire lives. Kim went to bed and I lifted the phone receiver, on the way to bed, and there was a dial tone, so I sent whatever had accumulated. I didn't read it, I just sent it, because I don't trust the phone. My favorite event of the day was Fatima coming in with three paintings, I'm infatuated with her. I want to lounge around in bed with her, after dinner and sex, and talk about the color blue. She smelled like a white flowery mystery. I had some other good moments, during the course of the day, but that one sticks out. I agreed with Sara that we had a show, and there will probably be another hundred pieces of work by the end of the day tomorrow. Sometimes I just use commas to slow things down. Like Emily, and her dashes. It's just a traffic monitor, not a point of view. No, wait, it is a point of view, not a traffic monitor, as it is a film. Remember that. I just recommend things, nothing I say is a mandate. Tom Speak the way you do. Read more...

Not Unusual

More people know me than I know. This is the phenomena of appearance. Fellow moppers recognize a stroke and ask if I'm that guy. Sometimes, just to be contrary, I deny any connection. I'd already gone home, but something I'd said led one person to hitting another and a small riot ensued. Responsibility only extends so far. I disavow everything. I was asleep, alone. I can't prove a damn thing. What I'm talking about. But I seem to be making sense. My fantasy, extended. When I get home from a very long day, my phone is out, again, and I have mail backed up. It's frustrating. Last day of accepting art and it's a bumper crop, there's art work everywhere in the museum, in the Richards gallery things are two deep. Pretty much what I did all day was deal with art and artists. I have to explain to several people that I know more about handling artwork than they do. Many acquaintances, and several new people that interest me. An old lady brought in three nudes that are wonderful. Keri, I own one of her college nudes, brought in a magnificent watercolor of a slightly garish woman that is fantastic. A great show, and barely time to hang it. I try to not get upset by the scheduling muck, but somebody doesn't have half a brain. Tomorrow is ridiculous. It's like three days in one. I can do it, it's a stretch, but I'm good at this. Making a show happen. All that old theater training comes to bare, you make a list and prioritize. I fell asleep on the sofa, woke to a pack of coon hounds, six in the morning, just after dawn, and the dogs are milling around my compost heap, smelling where the coons have been. Two Red-Bones, a Blue-Tick, and a couple of mutts; I take them out a bowl of water and left-overs from the fridge. They've been running all night. The Blue-Tick is alpha male and a lovely dog, deigns to let me scratch behind his ears. I check his tags and he's local, so I don't worry about the them finding their way home. I have a dial-tone, I'd better send this. Read more...

Simple Ethics

Clashing aspects. Not unlike other situations I've found myself in, where you're afraid to say anything, lest you rock the boat. My marriage was like that, teetering on the edge. Intelligence doesn't imply knowledge of the way things work, very bright people find themselves in dumb positions. I went for a drink with TR after work, and he was truly anguished that there could be such division in such a small staff. We were in Sara's office, TR, D, Sara and myself, and we were all laughing so hard we were crying. Sara had made a word-play off something TR had said and turned it into a Disney movie. Everything was only implied. I assume Kim knows to meet me at the museum. I assume, nine days from Sunday, you'd know what I'd mean. 4:01 in the morning. The process of paying attention. B came over in the morning, afraid I had died, as there was no sign of life. I was still asleep, having stayed up most of the night. He'd brought over an essay about friendship and solitude he wrote to present at the poetry conference. It's quite dense and very good. I had to read it four or five times to get the all the allusions. Not that I could get them all, but the ones that I could get. It's a treat knowing some of the best writers in the language, but it's also a challenge. Writing that has to be unraveled. A great day with the double-issue New Yorker, Science Fiction. I read SF, rarely Fantasy, then British Speculative Fiction, after which (maybe I was fifteen) I just read everything. It's been catch-up ever since. B and I had a conversation about a difficult subject this morning, difficult to wrap your brain around. Most writers write about something, some few just sail ahead, with spinnakers billowing, tap the well-spring and trust their technique. I prefer the latter, but it is, as Roy Blount Jr. said, 'hard listening'. As long as I continue to surprise myself, reveal my own underbelly, I consider it a serious act, and writing keeps me off the streets. Reading Peter Carey's new novel, "The Chemistry Of Tears", a lovely thing, he's such a beautiful writer; we don't actually see him, the writer, but we sense his presence, ghost writers in the sky kind of thing. Beat on your own tin drum. Gunter Grass, "The Flounder" is one of the great books, certainly his best. Life through the eyes of a cook. The person what (that) mops the floor. Thomas Hart Benton and John Curry are a joke, either you get it or you don't. What Carter does is around you, the actual environment. Those dead sunflowers are dead sunflowers, not a cartoon. I suppose if I was living in Cedar Rapids I'd be talking about Grant Wood, I love that painting "Appraisal" where two people are talking and one of them is holding a chicken. And Burchfield is a great painter. Regionalism. I chew on that for a while. Benton and Carter were both mainstays against Abstract Expressionism. Benton owes more than a nod to Rivera. Carter was the Master Sergeant. Just thinking. Magic Realism is a response to something. What was happening with art at the time. The way things morph. Read more...

Getting It

Had an exchange with Trish yesterday that I still can't get over. There's a wedding today, in the main gallery; so all the art work we've taken in so far for the juried show is stacked upstairs, a jumble, but manageable, we're on track to have the largest number of pieces ever, and it's the art, after all, that concerns me. And I'm ok about working with this wedding, the fact that we'll have to put a notice on the front door that we're accepting art in the front of the building, in the board room, during the actual wedding ceremony, because those are the museum hours, awkward as that seems. Hard to be clear about this, it's so confusing. To a certain point, it isn't that difficult. It's a museum, there's a protocol. I can deal with today, later, after my Saturday burrito. I love the way the Saturday burrito becomes a character. Sometimes I feel like a cartoon show. But seriously. I should mention that now that Sara and D are back we're talking about art, we go out back and have a cigaret, laugh. Next week is the reception that bottlenecks everything, and Trish asks me if there will be any art hanging by then, and the answer is a large NO, because of the wedding reception. Then, today, the two guys renting the place for next Saturday came in, and they're the ones who are upset about the no-art situation, and they unload on me. Why would they have rented an art museum without any art? It's a good question. I'm just standing there, eating Skittles, and I explain that the dates for the next show have been on the calendar for two years.They demand a reduction in the rental fee. Trish finally comes in, and I turn them over to her, retreat to the board room, from where I would be able to sort out the artists bringing in work from the members of the wedding party. It's an easy sort. I only have Skittles because it's another Candy Wedding. When did this shit start? A wedding with a Candy Bar and no alcohol? I'm appalled. Is this just a scam by the Dentistry Industry to generate more revenue, or is it an authentic expression of something? I like Skittles, pistachio nuts, black olives, things you can pop into your mouth. But a Candy Bar and no alcohol? We've sank this low. Frankly, there are times I'm embarrassed to be human. When the global thing washes over me, I have to just go watch tadpoles with a magnifying glass. Sort hardware. Do something. Three things do constitute a list. That may just be an assumption of mine. I spent a long time eliminating several commas. It's difficult to express your actual voice on paper. Extremely difficult, look at Emily. What the dashes represent. How you breathe that. Read more...

White Noise

Thinking about 'family values' I wonder how many marriages there have been in the US congress. If someone could get me a number, I'd appreciate it, and whether or not it was different from the median. Just wondered. Got up to pee in the middle of the night and my phone was working. When my phone is dead for more than a few hours I tend to pick it up, whenever I walk by, to see if there's a dial tone (to hear, more accurately), and then I can rant about rural service, but there was one, so I SENT whatever was accumulated, the latest enjambment of words. Looked more like a page than a paragraph. I'd have to modify what I told people, when they asked what I wrote, my usual answer was 'paragraphs' and now I'd have to add 'sometimes pages'. The phone doesn't work for a couple of days, and suddenly the paradigm changes. Is that possible? If I had intermittent land-line usage, I could, theoretically, write a novel, because it would look like one, pages of text. It's gotten so that I live for these moments, at 3:42 in the morning, when I struggle for a word. But there's something there, a larger thing I'm trying to get at, about striving. I'm not a pilgrim, and I don't have a religious work ethic. If you generate text, it takes a certain form, for me it's Arial 10 in these blocks that seem to replicate experience. The very idea that I could do that. Actually mean something. The way text generates experience. Stayed in town and listened to live music, B on bass, brother Ronnie on banjo, Brad on mandolin, Kevin on guitar. I know them all, and they were good, enjoying themselves. I sat with John Hogan, himself, got a free Irish and appetizer. My bar bill for the evening was six dollars, I tipped well. Too late to write, then when I got home tonight the phone was out, so I might not be able to send this. Usual "Cream..." day, taking in art, chatting with artists. Pegi and Trish cleaned the kitchen (the only place I ever worked where they don't clean up immediately after an event, they seem to always wait until the day before the next event, drives me crazy). They set up for the wedding too, which was good, because there were several things going on and I needed to stay available, in my role as the person who does 'everything else'. Some nice stuff, Todd Reynolds (just one painting, because he works so large he can only transport one at a time, two of us, watching for a break in traffic, carry it across the street, the varnish is still tacky) and Jeremiah, both of whom I quite like, both them and their work. More elevator stuff and I asked D to walk them around, to bring him up to speed on the impending elevator upgrade. A good day, and I beat the last of the rain home, got up the driveway, with supplies, but the goddamned phone was dead. I need to work differently, Skype, cell-phone, satellite, flash-drive, lap-top with a back up battery, I could improve my efficiency. Maybe not lose pages. And it's good to think about self-improvement, taking the bull by the horns; busier than a cat scratching it's ass, and, still, learning from the situation. I punctuate as a matter of speaking, where the pauses are, that I breathe, which took me years to realize. Now, it's just a matter of course. The way you parse what you say. Tom But I don't have a phone and I can't send. Pegi was mopping in a harebrained chevron, I think she was delusional and I certainly wasn't going to say anything, because she was mopping and I wasn't, it's probably always better if someone else is doing whatever it is, and she was singing under her breathe, Mel Torme songs. I had to go outside. I'm a 'Grateful Dead' kind of guy, and insipid jazz drives me crazy. I know how Clapton's guitar can speak, the way Edgar Meyer's transcriptions do. Sometime, when you have a few hours, you should listen to this. Read more...